FALL 2009 Workshop Schedule

The Memoir and The Memoirist, with Thomas Larson

Saturday, October 31, 1-3pm @ The LIT
$55 for Members; $75 for Nonmembers


"Writing the Memoir" ~ A memoir is a story that focuses on the meaning and intensity of a singular relationship in the author's life - unresolved feelings for a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend; coming to terms with a loss, an illness, a death; remembering a significant phase like childhood or adolescence or a period like college in which the writer was challenged or changed.


Join Thomas Larson, author of The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative, for a two-hour workshop in memoir writing. We begin by discussing the significant differences between traditional autobiography and contemporary memoir. Next we explore memoir?s demanding questions: Where do I begin? What is my focus? How do I discover the emotional truth of my story? How do I write about the living? With numerous writing prompts, we look at the mainstays of the memoir form: truth-telling and self-disclosure; sudden versus long-ago memoir; good and bad therapeutic writing; and the importance of metaphor and myth in the personal life.
                                                     

LIT Public Fiction Workshop with Paula McLain

Third Thursday of Every Month, Beginning September 17, 2009

6:30 - 9:00pm @ Trinity Commons: 2230 Euclid Ave.

Cost: Suggested Donation of $5/session with current LIT Membership ($35/year)

This workshop features Paula McLain, author of 2 collections of poetry, a memoir about growing up in foster care, Like Family: Growing Up In Other People’s Houses, 2003 and the novel, A Ticket to Ride, published by Ecco/HarperCollins. A second novel, which fictionalizes a portion of Ernest Hemingway’s life, will be published by Ballantine in 2011.

In these two-and-a-half-hour monthly workshops, time will be divided between becoming familiar with the tools of fiction writing, and discussing your work (stories, partial novels or novellas, exercises) in a workshop format. Each session will be organized around an element of craft—description and detail, characterization, scene building, dialogue, point-of view, fictional place and time, the balance between summary and scene, etc.—with assigned readings, class-discussion, writing exercises and prompts tailored for each element. Over the course of the year, we’ll be building on what we’re learning, pushing exercises into scenes, scenes into full-length stories and chapters of novels, and then discussing these pieces as a group. Participants can hope to leave the experience with an increased appreciation for and knowledge about what it means to write fiction, considerable material for individual fiction projects, and a real-sense of a nurturing writing community.


PUBLIC Fiction @ The LIT is presented with the generous support of Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.



Prose Poetry with Robert Miltner

 

Thursdays: October 1, 8, 22, and 29 @ The LIT; 6:30-8:30pm
$155 Members; $175 Nonmembers.

 Prose Poetry is hybrid genre of literature where poetry and short fiction intersect. Students will read examples of different types of prose poems, discover the historical origins, consider the literary contexts of the genre, examine the theory and practice the genre, and write prose poems. More than just a poem formatted into a “blockhead” paragraph, the prose poem relies upon an interior logic of associations and leaps, tends toward the surreal, allows for fugitive content, and yet still requires the attention that readers give to general poetry. Students will write prose in various categories of prose poems, including lists, landscapes, places, travelogues, objects, characters, narratives, surrealist, hyperbolic, journalistic, meditative, and combinations of some of these categories. Students will consider the relationship between form and content, prose and poetry, what gets in and what gets tossed out, and discover the exciting tricks this mongrel genre can perform. The first week will be an introduction to the prose poem and an overview of the course. Weeks two, three and four will be devoted to workshopping student work.



Personal Essay/Memoir:Writing The Self
with Neal Chandler

Saturdays: September 12, 19, 26 and October 3, 10, 17
9am-12pm @ Trinity Commons, 2230 Euclid Avenue; Cleveland 44114
$185 for Members; $225 for Nonmembers

Readers love writers who tell their own stories with the energy and vividness of great fabulists, but with the candor and self-transparence of a penitent saint. Each requirement is, for its own reasons, daunting, not least of all because each may run counter to the other. In this course, students will be assigned reading of relevant texts, will participate in in-class writing assignments, and will by course end, have a solid completed draft of a personal essay or a chapter from a larger work.

Learn the delicate art of essay as memoir from Neal Chandler, PhD., North East Ohio MFA instructor. Participants will generate new writing “based on experience, research, and reflection” to submit to the class for response and feedback. The goal over the six weeks is to generate a finished essay or chapter.


Writing Poetry: Rhyme, Reason and rhythm
with Robert Flanagan

ONE-DAY Intensive

Saturday, 26 September; 1-4pm @ The LIT

$75 for LIT Members; $95 for Nonmembers

 Why is poetry not prose? Because it has a different visual shape, a more auditory appeal, and a logic of image and metaphor. Poetry is more song and dream than prose, moving by associational leaps to a discovery. In the first half of the workshop we will cover the voice of poetry (diction, rhythm, pause, speed, tone) and the structure of verse (meter, rhyme, line length, stanza shape), do exercises in image and metaphor, and write a few chain poems as a group. In the second half we’ll workshop members’ submitted poems.


How to Write a Ten-Minute Play with Christopher Johnston

Saturdays: October 3, 10, 17, and 24; 1-3pm @ The LIT
Cost: $155 for Members; $175 for Nonmembers

The intention of this four-week course is to define what works well in the ten-minute format and develop the building blocks to write a ten-minute play – character, plot, dramatic action – in a more distilled form than a full-length play. The course will draw from life experience, subjects pertinent to the individual writers, as well as writer-interaction in the sessions to identify and shape the characters and the play. By the end of the course, writers should have a solid ten-minute play in their hand or at least a character of interest or the kernel of a longer play that they can continue to create.


Ongoing:

4 x 4 Local Perspectives

LIT Book Club @ Mac's Backs
4th Sundays of Every Other Month
4-6pm
Free for Current LIT Members

The only thing better than reading a good book is having a group of friends who want to discuss it. The LIT, in conjunction with Mac’s Backs on Coventry, is hosting one such group. Every month, beginning on Sunday, Sunday September 27th, with a guest appearance by Cleveland Author Dan Chaon, 4 X4 Local Perspectives: will meet at Mac’s Backs on Coventry to read and discuss fiction, poetry and non-fiction written by Ohio authors. Upcoming authors include David Giffels, Thrity Umrigar, Paula McLain, Kazim Ali, and others.


MARK YOUR CALENDERS!
Local Perspectives meets the fourth Sunday of every other month at Mac’s Backs on Coventry (1820 Coventry Rd., Cleveland Heights, 216/321-2665) at 4 pm, beginning Sunday, May 31st. If you have questions or to sign up, please contact facilitator Lee Chilcote at leechilcote@gmail.com.


LIT Public Poetry Workshop

Third Friday of Every Month

7:30pm @ Mac’s Backs on Coventry (www.macsbacks.com or 216.321.READ) Class Size: Maximum 30
Cost: Suggested donation of $5/session with current LIT Membership ($35/year)

For over thirty-five years, The LIT Public Poetry Workshop has offered Cleveland-area poets the monthly opportunity to bring in a poem and receive useful suggestions for its improvement and to offer the same kind of help to peers in writing. We attract a diverse group of serious, friendly poets, ranging from teenagers and young adults to poets with decades of experience. Come once or come every month: All are welcome!

About the Instructor:
Robert E. McDonough, one of the LIT”s founders, has been named one of the forty important Cleveland poets since the Second World War in Cleveland Poetry Scenes. His poems have appeared in his book, No Other World (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1988), his chapbook, Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2009), and numerous anthologies and little magazines.